People are imperfect, but the standards we put up? They are. When the two come into conflict, it can lead to some unfortunate behaviors. Eve Fairbanks remarks on the “shy Trump doubters,” and tries to explain your MAGA neighbor may not be the temporarily insane person they appear to be:
Democrats seemed to display an “extreme moral vehemence” matched with a vehement denial that they were intolerant. “I thought there were a lot of people going around saying things they didn’t really believe. They didn’t seem to feel any contradiction between their own conspicuous consumption and their leftism.” Her perception was that they frequently demanded apologies from conservatives, but “the apologies never did those people any good.” President Bill Clinton was a prime example of this double standard; he represented a party that insisted it — and only it — supported women’s empowerment while he preyed on a female intern. [The New York Times]
Which is certainly congruent with the views I often run across from progressives, which can be quite grating, if understandable. Of course, in turn Democrats have some quite valid grievances concerning Republicans, such as lionizing failed SCOTUS candidate Robert Bork, with the eponymous “borked” as shorthand for being denied a position on SCOTUS for no good reason.
Never mind that denial was bi-partisan (seven Republicans joined the Democrats in rejecting the nomination), and he was the hatchet-man of dubious morality in the Saturday Night Massacre. I will note that whether or not it was public knowledge that he had taken a bribe to do the deed is not known to me; but his role was sufficient to reject his nomination, which looked like a reward for bad behavior[1].
But there it is, being borked is in the political lexicon.
This is why I don’t join political parties; the necessary moral degradation doesn’t seem worth the dubious pleasures of paying dues and going to conventions. Maybe it’d be good that the morally indignant are in the Party, stepping on the toes of the zealots who try to whip up Party loyalties. It’s not in my appetite, though.
Back to Fairbanks:
Not long into the Trump presidency, though, my relative began to talk about what would happen if he were “driven out of office.” Other Trump-supporting friends used this phrasing, too, and I began to wonder if it was a sublimated yearning. It would accomplish two things: first, make Mr. Trump a martyr to leftist intolerance, and second, get him out of office.
The problem is that Fairbanks doesn’t present any scholarly evidence: polls or that sort of thing. She takes some personal experience and tries to suggest that it may be true nation-wide.
Which I sometimes do. It’s a fun game, and sometimes it’s even right.
And how it’ll affect the election results? Probably not at all.
1 And Bork’s replacement, Anthony Kennedy, was confirmed without dissent. The Democrats wanted competency; the Republicans wanted to reward moral incompetency. The bi-partisan rejection revealed a party in the process of mutating from responsible governance to grasping for power.
